Move past Lean...focus on being Passionate

Being passionate, not Lean, is the key to unlocking continuous improvement...

Modern day business and English language have more or less forgotten the word “Kaizen” from their vocabulary and have replaced it with seemingly easier terms such as Lean, OE and other such improvement programme names. Whether you choose to call it Lean, Six Sigma, OE, TPM or any of the other permutations of continuous improvement, one question remains a perpetual challenge…“What are main reasons for why some Continuous Improvement initiatives (not projects!) fail to sustain?”

Back in 2012, several blogs started appearing on social media networks garnering voice of the customer feedback as to the main reasons people have experienced. Many aspects of possible failures while implementing and sustaining Continuous Improvement initiatives were mentioned and intensively discussed, and with every new comment also new aspects of this topic were raised and many pieces of advice were given (or sometimes preached) on how to best sustain. After several hundred responses were given, a few people took it upon themselves to analyse the results (albeit recognising a small amount of subjectivity bias). The results of this analysis were as follows:

Although the 80/20 rule for a Pareto Chart is not really applicable here, many people chose to pick the first four highest bars for commentary. The discussions ranged from weighing up the pros and cons of top-down vs bottom-up deployment strategies, through to the right metrics to measure success of cultural change and how much of the organisation should be immersed in deep content knowledge. Much of this analysis fed into my work at the time, where we were just designing and developing a brand new CI agenda across our 90,000+ person organisation. This realisation that culture and leadership engagement was not simply a ‘success factor’ but the very essence of ‘why’ the organisation needed to change began to dawn on the team. It had a profound effect on our working group; so much so that we revisited our approach within the first 6 months of deployment to reinforce the level of cultural focus and reconfirmed our senior management team’s public commitment to CI to ensure two things:

• The creation of an empowered culture where leaders give intent to their people (rather than issuing orders), generating a learning organisation – perfectly summed up by L. David Marquet’s book Turn the Ship Around
• A secondly that financial results were an inevitable outcome of doing CI, but should not be the focus and certainly not its raison d’etre – a common mistake that many global organisations make by focusing on pounds and not people

Fast forward four years to October 2016 and the recent PEX conference in Amsterdam. As one author succinctly put it in his recent blog…“With more than 200 Operational Excellence professionals and vendors under one roof, you could be forgiven for expecting to leave with the secret formula for success in your notepad. On the contrary, the unofficial theme of the week seemed to be about sharing the shortfalls and lessons learned from less than perfect OpEx strategies.” Strangely enough further informal polls were conducted pre & post the event with a similar question to that posed above and back in 2012, and an interesting trend is starting to develop. Some may even say the trend is a little paradoxical, as it is beginning to indicate that many continuous improvement professionals & organisations are not themselves continuously improving. Much has been written on the topic of Cultural Change and its importance to the success of Continuous Improvement, with many organisations looking to take a more holistic approach to Improvement…akin to Systems Thinking (for those not familiar, Systems Thinking is based on the Toyota Production System and Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge – taking a bigger picture view of the “system” and all related items within it to identify failure demand and value adding actions). Recent voice of the customer indicates that categories A, H and J from the list above now make up three of the top six places!...how times have changed.

Let’s revisit my language point from the beginning of this article. Much can be said for the language and lexicon used when changing a culture and how subtle differences in how & when certain words are employed can have a major effect on people’s perceptions of the impending change. The most common mistake I witness across all industries is the synonymous misuse of the word “Lean” to replace “Kaizen”. Language often has hidden meaning deeply rooted in the culture of the country where it originated; only by understanding that culture can one truly understand and create the reality. Many people tend to assume that the way we understand language is common for the whole world…this is of course not the case.

In “Lean”, consciously or not, the approach drives the user to find something wrong with the given situation. The focus is on finding the wrong, the bad, the ugly and cut, eliminate, remove, and thus make it whole again. However consider for a moment, is it possible to change something bad into good simply by cutting? On an unconscious level, Lean focuses on finding what is wrong / wasteful with an organisation. There is first a need to show the negative aspects of a situation. Then satisfied that the ‘culprit’ has been found, the "cutting" operations starts. Unfortunately cutting damages the essence of the original harmony, sometimes to such an extent that the organisation might not get back to a harmonious state.

Rather than focusing on flaws, Kaizen focuses on what is present. Consider that life in Japan was (and to a certain extent still is) based on a thorough understanding of the body-mind relation and the ability to get the best out of the body, mainly by practicing a version of what many people popularly refer to today as ‘mindfulness’. Kaizen – literally translated as “change for the better” and more colloquially translated as “continuous improvement” – is based on Japanese Shinto (the indigenous faith of the Japanese people and as old as Japan itself and remains Japan's major religion alongside Buddhism). Shinto is the basis for many traditional martial arts. The main weapon was the sword. In this area especially Iai-do focuses on finding the most efficient way to use the sword and gives the mind the direct message of…“all is good, we are only optimising what has already been good to make it perfect in order to survive.”

During the times Toyota was growing as a car company, survival was still the main focus. There is no coincidence that people refer to improvement ‘Kata’ or ‘form’ when discussing both CI and martial arts. It was this basic thinking behind Toyota’s original “Kaizen”, “Jidoka” and “Just in Time” foundations that very much resembles the philosophy behind Iai-do.

Kaizen, in business, means constant improvement of all organisational functions, at every hierarchical level, from CEO to the front line. It doesn’t matter if the change happens one time or is constant, big or small, as long as it is a change for the better. In a more western management practice, a concept similar to Kaizen is the “learning organisation”. It’s a way for an organisation to remain competitive in the business environment by constantly evolving itself. The five main characteristics are:

• Shared vision
• Personal mastery
• Team learning
• Systematic thinking
• Mental models (the right mindset)

These five characteristics, while all are important, they do not carry the same weighting in terms of potential impact. One, above all others, has the potential to transform an organisation…mindset. Stanford professor Dr. Carol Dweck has found out that the biggest difference between successful and unsuccessful people lies in the mindset. You can either have a fixed mindset or a growth one. If you have a fixed mindset, as Blaz Kos writes, you believe that your character and potential are unchangeable, have been “written in stone” since birth. You assume that they cannot be modified or improved in a meaningful way. Thus any success in that kind of mindset is the result of inherited talent, the given resources and the environment you were born in. Instead of thinking of how to improve yourself, you hope that other people will be less competent than you. Let’s look at a practical example. Intelligence. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that intelligence is a static thing. This usually leads to avoiding challenges, seeing efforts as fruitless, ignoring useful feedback, feeling threatened by others’ success and giving up easily when challenges arise. Furthermore, it leads to a desire to only look smarter, but not really improve yourself. The sad final result of the fixed mindset is that people simply don’t develop their intellectual competences over time. They stay fixed, like their mindset is fixed.

In the growth mindset, intelligence is not a static thing but rather one that can be developed. Instead of only trying to look smart, it leads you towards developing intelligence by constantly learning, thus improving yourself overall. Another positive result is also the mindset of embracing challenges, a greater persistence, seeing effort as the path to mastery, learning from criticism and being inspired by others’ success. You see everything as a skill, and every skill can be practiced and improved.

For me, it is this mindset or DNA that differentiates the agendas that sustain and grow, from those that stall and crumble. It is this DNA that is the key to figuring out how to thrive – and not simply survive – through the operational & commercial volatility that we experience in the world. I believe that individuals with “Employee Passion” are key to Kaizen success. Three attributes characterise Employee Passion:

• Commitment to Domain – this can be understood as a desire to have a lasting and increasing impact on a particular industry or function
• Questing – actively seeking out challenges to rapidly improve their performance
• Connecting – seeking deep interactions with others and build strong, trust-based relationships to gain new insight

Together these attributes define the “Passion of the Explorer” – the employee passion that leads to extreme sustained performance growth. As individuals and leaders, we all have a role to play as we look to improve our performance and reach our full potential. Employee Passion is not employee engagement. Employee engagement is a snapshot to assess emotional commitment to organisational goals, rewards systems, work-life fit, and other initiatives. Engaged employees look forward to showing up, building friendships, and feeling connected to the company’s mission…Employee Engagement Indices (EEI) are no doubt key measures for organisations to gauge future success. Employee engagement leads to improved performance at the workplace. Organisations at the top quartile of engagement have significantly higher profitability and customer ratings, less turnover and absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents than those in the bottom quartile.

While employee engagement is sufficient in a world of predictability designed to optimise scalable efficiency…engagement on its own is insufficient in a world of unpredictability, constant change, and disruption. What’s missing from the typical discussion of employee engagement is a commitment to achieving full potential and a relentless focus on customer-centric performance improvement. Engaged employees are often content with their work but may not have the desire to reach the next level of performance. Engaged employees often enjoy stability, predictability, and the environment they are in, yet may lack the urge to challenge established processes as a result.

Engagement vs Passion…

We can start to foster passion through a two-pronged approach. First, attract individuals to your drive your agenda who already possess the Passion of the Explorer since these individuals have the greatest potential to thrive in an environment of constant change and ambiguity. Recruiting efforts should focus more on identifying dispositions and potential (future) and less on assessing candidates’ skills and credentials (history). Explorers motivate and energise, and bringing individuals on-board with the Passion of the Explorer will likely help elicit similar dispositions in the rest of the organisation.

Second, we should ask ourselves if we reward or punish failure and assess how we encourage (or discourage) people to actively collaborate with their ‘ecosystem’. Additionally, consider how to provide people with more visibility and clarity into how your improvement agenda makes an impact on the organisation and the broader industry or domain. Focusing on Employee Passion and building this into a holistic approach to improvement…at its heart, this is Kaizen…creating opportunities to ignite, amplify, and draw out Employee Passion…from senior leadership to the front line. This is the key to unlocking transformative success in an organisation…just imagine if all organisations directed just some of their efforts towards solving this ‘passion problem’, what would the main reasons for CI failure be then?